A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
nettle
The nettle is a common perennial of rich disturbed ground carrying hollow silica-tipped hairs on stem and leaf. Each hair is a sealed glass needle: touch it, the tip snaps off at a designed weak point, the broken end goes into the skin, and the contents are injected. It grows in dense stands wherever soil is high in phosphate, which is why nettles mark old middens, farmyards, and settlements.
Etymology
The word is Old English with relatives across the Germanic languages, and the older root appears to be connected to words for spinning and sewing thread, because nettle was a fiber plant long before it was a nuisance. Nettle cloth was made across northern Europe for thousands of years, and German army uniforms in the First World War used it when cotton ran short.
Notes
A stand of nettles is a fair archaeological indicator. The phosphate that favors them comes from bone, ash, and dung, so nettles persist for centuries on ground where people or livestock were concentrated, and surveyors read them alongside the earthworks. They are also the sole food plant of the caterpillars of several of the most familiar butterflies, including the peacock, small tortoiseshell, and red admiral.